


all these tears I've cried

by lucyprestons (leviosaphoenix)



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Nightmares, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 09:22:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14422380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leviosaphoenix/pseuds/lucyprestons
Summary: A snapshot of Lucy's nightmares, and the aftermath of each. Loosely set between 2x05 and 2x06.





	all these tears I've cried

**Author's Note:**

> Well, since 2x05 I've been having a lot of emotions, so I wrote this quick thing a couple of days ago (before 2x06 aired). Here, share my pain.
> 
> Laura, this one's your fault. 
> 
> Title and lyrics from These Four Walls by Little Mix.
> 
> Lucy x Wyatt Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/12159770374/playlist/6CRkpKIyxtDrcYiru8ZZzK

_And I, I can't come alive_  
_I want the room to take me under_  
_'cause I can't help but wonder_  
_What if I had one more night for goodbye?_  
_If you're not here to turn the lights off I can't sleep  
These four walls and me_

A wounded soldier from Michigan begging for his life on the floor of a run-down cabin in 1918.

He’s a familiar face in her nightmares, a frequent visitor during waking hours when she’s lost in her thoughts. Horrified eyes and the fountain of scarlet swim together in her mind until she has to fight the urge to throw up the little food she’s been able to eat. Sometimes she loses that battle.

Tonight, there’s a little variation. She fires; he moans, but continues to reach for her. She fires again, painting his shirt red, and he begs her to stop. No matter how many shells she puts into him, he continues to crawl to her, hands held out in supplication, and she backs away until her back hits something solid behind her.

She turns, and it’s Wyatt, his face cold and his eyes missing the usual sparkle they have when he looks at her. Jessica is flanking him, looking scared and vaguely disgusted.

Her victim groans her name again.

“Wyatt, help me,” she pleads, gripping his wrists, but he pulls away with a frown, reaching an arm around Jessica and shielding her against his chest.

“Get away from us,” he snaps.

A thud on the floor makes Lucy turn back, and a blood-soaked hand lunges for her ankles, cold and sharp against her bare skin…

She sits up so fast she almost tumbles off her bed, a shriek rattling from her lungs and tearing out of her throat before she can stop it. Jiya cries out her name, but she’s too busy crawling out of her bunk and across the floor, too shaky to stand. She gets violently sick in the trashcan, over and over, until she’s just sobbing and trying to wipe away the amalgamation of sweat and sick and tears on her face with the sleeve of her sweater.

She becomes aware of Jiya’s hand rubbing slow circles on her back, and she tries to time her desperate breaths with the soothing rhythm. It works somewhat, and the ringing in her ears subsides until she can hear her friend murmur something about getting Wyatt.

“No!” she gasps, looking up to meet Jiya’s tired, anxious eyes. “You can’t. Please. He can’t know.”

“Your scream was almost enough to peel the paint off the walls,” Jiya says, sympathetically. “I’m sure they all know.”

Sure enough, there’s a sudden hammering at the door, and Lucy stuffs her fist into her mouth to slow her sobs, squeezing her eyes tightly shut.

“Lucy?” Wyatt demands from outside the room. “Jiya?”

“It’s okay, we’re okay,” Jiya calls after a moment’s hesitation.

“What happened? Can I come in?”

“No,” she answers, seeing the expression on Lucy’s face. “It was… a big spider, that’s all. I’ve killed it. Go back to sleep.”

There’s a pause where they both hold their breath, thinking he’s left.

“Lucy?” he asks, his voice softer this time.

She pictures his expression from her dream, the way he’d held Jessica as if _Lucy_ were the threat to her safety.

“I’m fine,” she answers, her voice carefully controlled.

A few seconds pass, then his booted footsteps pad away from their door. She can picture him, waking in a panic with his arms around his wife, hurriedly throwing on his boots - and the rest of his clothes, Lucy realizes, with another wave of nausea - and grabbing his gun, always ready to face any danger.

She rubs absently at her leg where she can still feel the fingers that gripped her, an icy touch that chills her entire body to the core.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jiya asks, gently.

Lucy shakes her head.

Together, they clamber to their feet, and Jiya helps Lucy back into bed. She quietly slips out with the offending trashcan and returns a few minutes later with a bar of chocolate.

“Worked for Harry Potter,” Jiya murmurs, and Lucy gives a weak smile in answer, forcing the snack down despite the way it sticks to the lump in her throat.

An hour later, as her friend’s steady breathing fills the room, Lucy allows herself to cry again, tears making patterns on her pillow until exhaustion finally takes over and she slips into a fretful, restless sleep.

* * *

The next night, it’s Wyatt with a bullet in his leg, crawling towards her and begging for his life.

Try as she might, she can’t control her arms, can’t direct the shotgun away from the face of the man she loves. Emma is behind him, taunting laughter punctuating her gleeful encouragement.

“Do it! Shoot him!”

Lucy whimpers his name as he pulls himself up to a sitting position, reaching out to her. She is frozen to the spot, she can’t back up any further, and the cacophony of Wyatt’s pleas and Emma’s cackling and a voice that sounds a lot like Jessica’s pointing out that she’s merely a _teacher_ rises until she closes her eyes and cries out in desperation.

There’s a deafening crack, the recoil from the gun in her hands launching her backwards, and then she drops it and clamps her hands over her ears in relief.

“Lucy,” his voice breaks through the sudden, oppressive silence, and she opens her eyes. She’s back in the bunker again, in her own bed, and there are two of him, one lying dead on the blood-spattered floor and the other kneeling in front of her with wild eyes.

She blinks, gaze flickering between the two, until the corpse shimmers and vanishes.

Wyatt, the real Wyatt, cradles her face in his hands, and she longs to fall forward into him, inhale his comforting scent and hide her tears in his soft shirt.

Instead, she slowly pushes him away, scooting back on her mattress until her back hits the cold and unforgiving wall.

“You wouldn’t wake up,” Jiya says, apologetically. She’s standing in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself, and Lucy realizes with a start that her friend is impatiently brushing away her own tears. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I overheard her telling Rufus why she’d been so tired lately,” Wyatt says, a quiet, hurt anger seeping into his voice despite his attempts to keep it under control. “She said your nightmares have been getting worse. I told her to come get me the next time it happened.”

Lucy had thought she couldn’t feel any worse, but the defeated, exhausted hollowness behind Jiya’s eyes fills her with suffocating guilt.

“I’m sorry I’ve been keeping you awake,” she murmurs, swallowing back the sour bile in her throat once more.

“I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this from me,” Wyatt says, but Jiya clears her throat pointedly, and he lowers his gaze in shame. “I mean, I guess I wish you came to me about it. You know I have a little experience with post-traumatic stress.”

“Really?” Lucy asks, her tone skeptical despite the sobs threatening to choke her. “You can’t imagine why I wouldn’t want to come to you?”

He inhales, sharply. “I deserve that.”

Lucy looks away from him, hugging her pillow to her chest like a shield.

“Maybe you should go,” Jiya says, quietly.

He glances at Lucy, waiting for her to protest, to ask him to stay, to acknowledge him at all.

“You should go bunk with Rufus, get some sleep,” Lucy says to Jiya, without looking around. “I’ll be okay on my own for a while.”

Jiya murmurs her assent, grabbing a sweater and retreating from the room. After a moment, Wyatt follows, murmuring that he’ll be in the kitchen if she needs him.

She doesn’t sleep, instead remaining there with her knees bent up. The darkness fills all corners of the room, creeping toward her like an oil slick spreading across still water. In her peripheral vision, she thinks she sees a shadow on the floor again, but she refuses to look. Instead, she employs the same technique she had used the day she’d killed an innocent in 1918, withdrawing from herself, padlocking her pain in a box until she is empty and cold, a chalkboard dusted clean.

With the phantom of Wyatt’s corpse to keep her company, she gazes vacantly into the darkness until sunrise.

* * *

This time, Lucy takes a deep, steadying breath while her gun is trained on the face of a young American soldier, then swings around to aim at Emma instead. She’s too slow, and her enemy shoots first. There’s a pain in her leg like fire and ice all at once, and she falls to the ground with a scream of agony.

Her mother scoffs, shaking her head with resigned disappointment.

“You had so much _potential,_ Lucy.”

Gasping in pain, Lucy turns to crawl away, seeing the wall behind her opening up to a long, dark corridor, and there are two people with their backs to her, walking slowly into the void.

She would know the set of those broad shoulders and that messy head of hair anywhere.

“Wyatt!” she gasps, but she can barely bring her voice above a whisper. “Wyatt, help!”

He doesn’t look back, but he takes the hand of the blonde woman beside him as they continue to leave together.

“Wyatt!” Lucy screams. “Wyatt, please! You promised…” she trails off, the pain spreading up her leg and through her spine as the room sways around her. “You promised I still had you.”

He fades into the distance, and the butt of a gun presses into her back, and she sobs against the floor, unable to draw breath into her lungs.

“Lucy!”

Her eyes fly open and this time, she doesn’t make it to the trashcan, throwing up on herself and her blankets, twisted and already damp with sweat.

When it’s over, she glances up to apologize to Jiya, but flinches when she meets panicked blue eyes instead.

“Wyatt,” she says, hoarsely, both unsure what else to say, and certain that just his name is enough to carry a thousand words between them. He understands, of course, because he always has when it comes to her; it’s one of the reasons she loves him.

“Here,” he murmurs, holding out a towel and attempting to help clean her up. She is still shaking, ice cold, and now wracked with embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, like a reprimanded child, dissolving into tears.

He discards the towel, ignoring the mess and pulling her into his embrace. She is too weak, too exhausted to fight him, and his arms are warm and she’s _missed_ him.

“Don’t be sorry,” he tells her. “It’s my fault. _I’m_ the one that should be sorry.”

He strokes her hair until her crying subsides and the shaking fades, and a paralyzing tiredness threatens to overwhelm her. The illusion of night is inviting, as if this moment is hovering in the limbo between wakefulness and sleep, reality and dream.

“She’ll still be here in the morning,” Lucy finally says, so softly she wouldn’t think he heard her, save for the way his hand briefly tightens on her shoulder.

“She will,” Wyatt admits with a sigh.

“So what do we do?” she asks, twisting to meet his eyes.

He smiles, sadly. “What we always do. We wing it, together.”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and he kisses her hair.

“Will you stay with me, just for the night?” Her question slips out, unbidden, and she immediately wishes she could take it back, knowing she can’t bear to hear his rejection.

Instead, he grabs the clean pillow and blankets from Jiya’s bed, unused since she had been sharing with Rufus, and guides Lucy to lie down with her head in his lap. The gentle grip of unconsciousness reaches for her almost instantly, the post-adrenalin crash an intoxicating sleep aid when combined with his safe, reassuring presence.

“You know how I feel about you, Lucy.”

She’s not sure if she imagined the words.

The nightmares remain at bay.

When she wakes in the morning, she is alone again, but she will not let herself fall to pieces. With time, the pain will pass and the wound will heal. She has an enemy to defeat and a team to support, and the world is bigger than her shattered heart.

And if a small, selfish corner of her soul lights up when Wyatt’s eyes meet hers for a long, promising moment across the dining table, she’s not breathing a word of it to anyone.


End file.
